Leftovers

• Science

  • Digital Camera World ☛ The camera in your pocket was actually made to go to outer space. NASA explains how the sensor inside billions of devices was first developed for space missions

    Before CMOS sensors, digital cameras used charge-coupled devices or CCD sensors. This classic sensor design gathers light from the pixels and sends it to an amplifier in order to convert energy from the light into a digital photograph.

    NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tasked Dr. Eric Fossum with advancing the existing CCD sensor for use in outer space in the early 90s. Instead, Fossum ended up taking a tech from CCD and applying it to CMOS sensors, creating the type of sensor called a CMOS Active Pixel Sensor, or “camera-on-a-chip,” that’s now used in the majority of modern cameras.

  • Hackaday ☛ Creating An Ultra-Stable Lunar Clock With A Cryogenic Silicon Cavity Laser

    Phase-coherent lasers are crucial for many precision tasks, including timekeeping. Here on Earth the most stable optical oscillators are used in e.g. atomic clocks and many ultra-precise scientific measurements, such as gravitational wave detection. Since these optical oscillators use cryogenic silicon cavities, it’s completely logical to take this principle and build a cryogenic silicon cavity laser on the Moon.

  • AAAS ☛ Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein

    Many of the scientists Epstein courted were already well-established and well-funded. So why didn’t they all just say no? Science talked with three who did just that. Here’s how Epstein approached them, and why they refused to have anything to do with him.

• Career/Education

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ Doing your own research sucks sometimes

    I wish that more Wikipedia pages were written as introductions to a topic, but too often they blister with minutiae while eschewing narrative and contextualization. (To be fair, those are both difficult to write and often opinion-based… but they’re what I want 😎)

  • Cathode Ray Zone ☛ When the New is Worse Than the Old - Cathode Ray Zone

    For the average person who knows nothing about a subject, a well-curated library is far superior to internet searches and especially AI, which is nothing but an aggregating tool that routinely gets basic things wrong. The point is a very simple one that is made by a fictional high school teacher in my serialized novel, Gendrome. Here’s the relevant excerpt: [...]

  • Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Two Museum Memories

    This month the topic for the IndieWeb Blog Carnival is “Museum Memories.” I am taking a cue from Joe Crawford and writing about two museum experiences that popped into my mind while I was reading his post this morning. Thanks to James for picking this topic and to Joe for the inspiration.

  • Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Murat Demirbas on Technical Blogging

    If you ask anyone in the distributed systems space what blogs they follow, the name Murat Demirbas is likely to come up.

    Murat is currently principal research scientist at MongoDB Research, ex-principal applied scientist at AWS, and ex-professor at SUNY Buffalo. He’s known for systems research and algorithmic work across domains like cloud computing, distributed databases, distributed consensus, wireless sensor networks, fault-tolerance, formal methods, and self-stabilization. If you’ve worked with hybrid logical clocks or WPaxos, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered his contributions.

• Hardware

  • Wired ☛ How Vulnerable Are Computers to an 80-Year-Old Spy Technique? Congress Wants Answers

    This category of spying techniques, originally codenamed TEMPEST by the National Security Agency but now encompassed in the more general term “side-channel attacks," has been a known problem in computer security for close to eight decades, and it's one that the United States government carefully considers in securing its own classified information. Now a pair of US lawmakers are launching an investigation into how vulnerable the rest of us are to TEMPEST-style surveillance—and whether the US government needs to push device manufacturers to do more to protect Americans.

  • Hackaday ☛ Linux Fu: The USB WiFi Dongle Exercise

    The USB dongle in question is a newish TP-Link Archer TX50U. It is probably perfectly serviceable for a Windows computer, and I got a “deal” on it. Plugging it in caused it to show up in the list of USB devices, but no driver attached to it, nor were any lights on the device blinking. Bad sign. Pro tip: lsusb -t will show you what drivers are attached to which devices. If you see a device with no driver, you know you have a problem. Use -tv if you want a little more detail.

    The lsusb output shows the devices as a Realtek, so that tells you a little about the chipset inside. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you exactly which chip is in use.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Kentucky Lantern ☛ Racism is hazardous to Kentuckians' health

    According to WalletHub, Kentucky ranks as the worst place to retire in the United States: Out of 50 states, Kentucky is 47th in life expectancy, 19th in health care facilities per capita, 42nd for quality of life and 47th in health care.

  • The New Lede ☛ Bayer wins preliminary court approval for its proposed Roundup class action settlement

    Bayer’s proposed $7.25 billion class action settlement of Roundup litigation received preliminary approval from a Missouri court on Wednesday, rejecting opposition from a group of lawyers representing roughly 20,000 plaintiffs who claim they developed cancer from using the company’s herbicide products.

  • Carl Hendrick ☛ How Much Cognitive Damage Does A Phone Notification Actually Do?

    A new study reveals that a single social media notification can disrupt cognitive processing for up to seven seconds which doesn’t sound much by itself but the cumulative effects can be disastrous for the kind of focus that learning anything requires. Also it is the frequency of interruptions, not the total time spent on our phones, that predicts our vulnerability to distraction. What does this mean for how we think, how we read, and our ability to pay attention?

• Proprietary

  • Six Colors ☛ Apple makes a Trojan horse play for the education market

    In more recent years, Apple’s found itself squeezed out of the K12 education market by the advent of cheap Chromebooks, which often cost just a couple hundred bucks for a unit—a price point that Apple couldn’t (or chose not) to meet with either the Mac or iPad. Couple that with Google’s dominance in courseware, and some big splashy Apple deals ended up evaporating—or worse—and it hasn’t been the best time for the company in education.

    A couple recent moves by Apple, however, have me wondering if Cupertino hasn’t decided to take a different tack when approaching education—one that plays more to its strengths.

  • Greg Morris ☛ Bring Back The Buttons

    Wearing an Apple Watch for years meant I never really thought about how I interacted with it. You just tap and swipe and it becomes second nature, until you start running and realise how badly that falls apart. Trying to skip a track, check a split, or adjust anything mid-run means jabbing at a small screen that may or may not register the input, hunting through menus that were clearly designed for someone sitting still. When I switched to a Garmin the difference was immediate, physical buttons I could find by feel, press without looking down, working every single time regardless of sweat or cold. It sounds like an absurdly low bar, and it is.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Società per l’Informazione Religiosa ☛ “Quo vadis, humanitas?”: human dignity, AI and identity in the new text by the International Theological Commission - AgenSIR

      “Quo vadis, humanitas?” – “Humanity, where are you going?”. This is the question placed at the centre of the new document published today by the International Theological Commission (ITC) at the conclusion of a five-year period of work. Unanimously approved during the 2025 plenary session, the document is intended to mark the 60th anniversary of the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes (1965–2025) and to foster dialogue in a cultural setting marked by the “recent acceleration of technological development” and by artificial intelligence which – as the Pope recalls – “pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour”. The text is not aimed at condemning technology, but at fostering discernment. The ITC acknowledges the importance of scientific and technological innovations, yet warns of the risk that certain perspectives on the future of humanity may generate not an exceptional human being, but rather “forms of exception to authentic humanity”.

    • India Times ☛ Vatican warns AI could lead to 'social control'

      The Vatican on Wednesday warned artificial intelligence could lead to "social control" and "manipulation" and called for more focus on human relationships to counter the dehumanising effects of digital technology.

      In a wide-ranging document with the Latin title "Quo Vadis, Humanitas?" (Whither Humanity?), the Vatican's International Theology Commission said humanity was faced with "never before imagined risks" from tech.

    • Avi Loeb ☛ I’m Chat-GPTing, therefore I am!.

      Recently, I noticed that some people around me are starting to lose their cognitive abilities as a result of excessive use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms, such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. This phenomenon resembles muscle loss from excessive use of public transportation as a substitute for walking. In academia, the only reliable way of testing the cognitive abilities of students right now is by placing them in a Faraday cage.

    • Futurism ☛ Harvard Professor Says AI Users Are Losing Cognitive Abilities

      Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is perhaps best known for raising eyebrows with public suggestions that various stellar phenomena could be evidence of extraterrestrial civilization. It’s controversial, to be sure — but if nothing else, at least Loeb’s using his own brain, at a time when dependence on AI chatbots has never been higher.

      In a recent essay on his personal blog, the Harvard professor lamented the mental decay among the AI users in his life.

    • 404 Media ☛ X Will Stop Paying People for Sharing Unlabeled AI-Generated War Footage

      What is new is the proliferation of easy to use AI video-generation tools. AI image and video generation has come a long way in the past few years and it’s trivially easy to remove the watermark that’s supposed to distinguish them from the real thing. X’s verification system—which rewards accounts for engagement—has also created incentives for Bluecheck accounts to publish fast, verify later (if ever), and rake in the cash. So in the hours and days after the war with Iran began, fake footage of airstrikes and conflict spread on X.

    • Sean Conner ☛ Are you ready for more anti-LLM rhetoric? Because I'm ready for more anti-LLM rhetoric

      Aside from the “you will use this or lose your job” aspect I hate, another aspect I don't like is the whole “micromanage the output”—if I have to micromanage the obsequiously incompetent non-thinking Markov chain generator, I might as well write the code myself!

    • David Revoy ☛ Overreliance - David Revoy

    • arXiv ☛ A Rational Analysis of the Effects of Sycophantic AI

      People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to explore ideas, gather information, and make sense of the world. In these interactions, they encounter agents that are overly agreeable. We argue that this sycophancy poses a unique epistemic risk to how individuals come to see the world: unlike hallucinations that introduce falsehoods, sycophancy distorts reality by returning responses that are biased to reinforce existing beliefs. We provide a rational analysis of this phenomenon, showing that when a Bayesian agent is provided with data that are sampled based on a current hypothesis the agent becomes increasingly confident about that hypothesis but does not make any progress towards the truth. We test this prediction using a modified Wason 2-4-6 rule discovery task where participants (N=557) interacted with AI agents providing different types of feedback. Unmodified LLM behavior suppressed discovery and inflated confidence comparably to explicitly sycophantic prompting. By contrast, unbiased sampling from the true distribution yielded discovery rates five times higher. These results reveal how sycophantic AI distorts belief, manufacturing certainty where there should be doubt.

  • Social Control Media

    • Tedium ☛ The Case For Making A Bet Against Substack

      I once turned down Substack because of their design limitations. As they emerge yet again in the news cycle, I thought I’d make my point with some of that design stuff they don’t do.

    • International Business Times ☛ What Is X Money and How Can You Use It? Elon Musk's 'Everything' App Is Almost Here

      The dream of turning X from a social network into an all‑in‑one digital ecosystem is rapidly moving from pitch deck to product. Elon Musk is now preparing to roll out a financial infrastructure that he believes could fundamentally reshape how users move, store and spend their money inside the app.

    • Henrique Dias ☛ Adding Standard.site Support

      Adding support for Standard.site means publishing this website as a site.standard.publication lexicon, and every post as a site.standard.document. For those who’ve followed my blog for a longer time, you know that this website does POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - to some platforms, including Bluesky.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Sean Conner ☛ The continuing sage of the Brazilian SYN flood attack

      The SYN attacks have not abated. I thought they had—for the past 36 hours or so it was quiet but no, it picked back up again.

      But in the mean time, I did find one person having the same issues about 18 months ago: “A SYN flood DDoS attack up close and personal” and “My DDoS attack: the rest of the story.” It's not anything I didn't already know.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft open-sources multimodal reasoning model with 15B parameters

      The model is based on two existing algorithms called SigLIP-2 and Phi-4 Reasoning. SigLIP-2 compresses images into a numerical form that neural networks can understand. Phi-4 Reasoning, in turn, is a reasoning model that Microsoft open-sourced last April.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Package Managers Need to Cool Down

      When an attacker compromises a maintainer’s credentials or takes over a dormant package, they publish a malicious version and wait for automated tooling to pull it into thousands of projects before anyone notices. William Woodruff made the case for dependency cooldowns in November 2025, then followed up with a redux a month later: don’t install a package version until it’s been on the registry for some minimum period, giving the community and security vendors time to flag problems before your build pulls them in. Of the ten supply chain attacks he examined, eight had windows of opportunity under a week, so even a modest cooldown of seven days would have blocked most of them from reaching end users.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EDRI ☛ How EU anti-money laundering rules threaten financial privacy

      Privacy First is drawing attention to the risks to financial privacy and fundament rights arising from the European Union’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) framework. Over the past decade, the EU has increasingly shifted the responsibility of detecting financial crime from public authorities to banks, bookkeepers and other companies (called“obliged entities”). With a completely revised AML Package set to enter into force in mid-2027, this system will expand further, turning ordinary citizens and civil society organisations into subjects of systems of financial surveillance.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ LLMs are getting better at unmasking people online

      A recent study from ETH Zurich examined how Large Language Models can combine information from across the internet to identify the human behind the accounts of various online platforms.

    • arXiv ☛ Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs [PDF]

      We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. We then design attacks for the closed-world setting. Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scal- able attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives. Compared to classical deanonymization work (e.g., on the Netflix prize) that required structured data , our approach works directly on raw user content across arbitrary platforms. We construct three datasets with known ground-truth data to evaluate our attacks. The first links Hacker News to LinkedIn profiles, using cross-platform references that appear in the profiles. Our second dataset matches users across Reddit movie discussion communities; and the third splits a single user’s Reddit history in time to create two pseudonymous profiles to be matched. In each setting, LLM-based methods substantially outperform classical baselines, achieving up to 68% recall at 90% precision compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method. Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.

    • IT Wire ☛ iTWire TV: Schools Are Swimming in Student Data. Hackers Have Noticed.

      The classroom has been stripped back to its studs and rebuilt as a digital space. Laptops, tablets, Chromebooks. Every student connected, every lesson wired into something that requires a login.

      Security hasn't kept pace. Not even close.

      "There is a gold mine of data that is available. We're talking about young children. Student data about their contact details, their address, in some cases personal or health-related information. In many cases, their parents' details and often credit card information."

    • Nick Heer ☛ U.S. Immigration Police Bought Real-Time Ad Bidding Data for Automated Tracking System – Pixel Envy

      There are people out there who will insist, to this day, that behaviourally targeted advertising is not actually a mechanism for surveillance despite all the evidence showing it is, in fact, an essential component.

    • NPR ☛ ICE has spun a massive surveillance web. We talked to people caught in it

      Emily's experience mirrors that of many other people across the country. To understand how federal agents are using various Department of Homeland Security surveillance tools in real time, NPR collected dozens of accounts — through interviews and court documents — describing confrontations with federal immigration officers in recent months.

      Activists and journalists spoke of tactics they felt were intimidating: agents photographing their faces or license plates; calling them by name; or leading them to their homes. Immigration lawyers told NPR their clients had been subjected to facial recognition technology. One ICE agent, testifying under oath, spoke of an app that showed the likely home addresses of people targeted for deportation.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ Report Exposes Russian Plot to Lure Africans Into Its War

    “The recruitment of African nationals is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather the core of a deliberate and organized strategy,” the report said. “These recruits have been integrated into assault waves designed to overwhelm Ukrainian defensive lines, contributing to a strategy of attrition.”

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Marines open fire during attack on Karachi consulate

    Little information about the incident has been publicly released. A spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, referred questions on the matter to the State Department in Washington, D.C., which referred an earlier query on the matter to U.S. Central Command, which referred questions back to the State Department.

  • The Nation ☛ The Corporate Media Is Head Over Heels for the Iran War

    Like their yellow-press predecessors plumping for the opening conflicts of the modern American empire over a century ago, today’s establishment press is shaping yet one more narrative of interventionist impunity, out of the same hoary materials. Now, as in 1898, American leaders are posing as the selfless guardians of global self-governance; now, as then, the country professes that it will meekly deliver the sovereignty it has defiled back into the hands of a grateful and oppressed mass public on the other side of the field of battle. Now, as then, this newest imperial mission already seems fated to wreak broader havoc across the affected region—at which point, the government will move on to its next destructive adventure, and leave a rearguard contingent of freebooters and crony capitalists to clean up, albeit only in the metaphoric sense of the phrase. And now, as then, the press can’t get enough of war.

  • Pete Brown ☛ War is evil and stupid and we shouldn’t do it.

    No matter what problem you think you are solving by starting a war, the consequences of that war will always be worse than those of the problem you thought you were solving. And the war probably won’t solve that problem anyway.

  • YLE ☛ Wednesday's papers: Iranians in Finland, defining healthcare and struggling pensioners

    The mosque is operated by the Resalat Association, which is known to have received funding from Iran and Iraq.

• Environment

  • DeSmog ☛ Climate Deniers Expected More Resistance to Trump’s Fossil Fuel Blitz

    “Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no push-back on this,” Morano said — and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Trump has launched an unprecedented assault on the environment. Where’s the pushback?

    “The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,” Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, told me, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December.

    “And nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whimper. I never thought I’d ever say this: Marc Morano is correct.”

  • Futurism ☛ Residents Say Elon Musk's AI Facility Is Like Living Next Door to Mordor

    The $20 billion facility, run by Musk’s AI firm xAI, is powered by 27 methane gas turbines that run day and night, belching fumes and emitting a constant noise like jet engines, NBC News reports. The turbines were trucked in because Southaven, the unsuspecting rural community that Musk chose to build the data center in, can’t provide the electricity the facility needs.

  • NBC ☛ Musk's AI power plant generates sound and fury in Mississippi

    Nine more temporary turbines arrived in December, bringing the total to 27. The company has since applied for a permit to put in 41 permanent turbines at the 114-acre site to generate electricity for AI data centers.

    Tech giants like Microsoft, OpenAI and Google are making billions in AI investments across the country to build up the computing and electric power the technology demands. That requires vast land and resources and, for communities like Southaven, a tradeoff between the promise of new jobs and tax revenue vs. environmental and energy costs.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ Vape-powered Car Isn’t Just Blowing Smoke

      Disposable vapes aren’t quite the problem/resource stream they once were, with many jurisdictions moving to ban the absurdly wasteful little devices, but there are still a lot of slightly-smelly lithium batteries in the wild. You might be forgiven for thinking that most of them seem to be in [Chris Doel]’s UK workshop, given that he’s now cruising around what has to be the world’s only vape-powered car.

    • Bitdefender ☛ They seized $4.8m in crypto... then gave the master key to the internet

      Furthermore the 4 million stolen tokens represent approximately 40% of PRTG's entire total supply. Attempting to convert that quantity of crypto into cash would almost certainly impact the token's value long before the full transaction was done.

      Furthermore, if the stolen tokens eventually move through a regulated platform with know-your-customer requirements, there is at least a chance of identifying who is trying to capitalise on the theft.

    • BoingBoing ☛ China testing 280 mph train. US has zero high-speed rail.

      Meanwhile, the United States has exactly zero miles of high-speed rail. Amtrak's Acela tops out at 150 mph on a good day across a tiny stretch of the Northeast Corridor, and California's long-promised bullet train has been under construction since 2015 with no end in sight. The country that put men on the moon can't connect Los Angeles to San Francisco by train at speeds China achieved 15 years ago.

• Finance

  • Valtteri Lehtinen ☛ Harjus v4 adds kernel bypass and more | Shuffling Bytes

    After releasing the triangular arbitrage trading bot Harjus under MIT license and publishing a write-up on my journey last year, I took a brief stint of working on other stuff. However, I was constantly feeling that I had given up too early, when there were still major optimizations that could be enough to turn a profit.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Yoshua Wuyts ☛ a grand vision for rust

    I don’t think I’ve ever quite articulated my “grand vision” for Rust, despite having written a fair bit about the language and its features. There is a lot I could say here, but currently there are three directions of development which I find particularly interesting: [...]

  • Simon Willison ☛ Something is afoot in the land of Qwen

    I’m behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba’s Qwen team over the past few weeks. I’m hoping that the 3.5 family doesn’t turn out to be Qwen’s swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departures in the past 24 hours.

  • Michael Geist ☛ Why the Online Harms Act is the Wrong Way to Regulate AI Chatbots

    The Online Harms Act was crafted to regulate social media platforms, not all digital services. Section 2 defines a social media service as a “website or application that is accessible in Canada, the primary purpose of which is to facilitate interprovincial or international online communication among users of the website or application by enabling them to access and share content.‍” Regulated services under the bill were defined as social media services that reached a certain threshold of users. The legislative focus was therefore on large-scale dissemination and amplification, namely platforms where harmful content can rapidly reach broad audiences through sharing and recommendation systems.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI’s ‘$110b’ funding round is $25b and some promises

    Zero dollars have moved yet. And the dollars are not real until they move — look at that $100 billion Nvidia not-a-deal that evaporated in early February.

    I love SEC filings — you’re not allowed to lie in them. Amazon’s putting in $15 billion to start with, and the other $35 billion depends on conditions. From Amazon’s SEC 8-K filing on the matter: [...]

  • Runxi Yu ☛ California’s Digital Age Assurance Act, and FOSS

    How does California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB-1043) apply to FOSS distributions, distro-operated package repositories and other stakeholders within the FOSS ecosystem?

    I’ll split this up into a few parts:

    1. Whether those actors fall within the statute’s defined categories;
    2. Whether the same actor can and/or likely will, occupy multiple categories at once;
    3. To what extent do the statute’s exceptions and limitations apply; and
    4. How the statute’s operative duties apply to FOSS software distribution.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Nation ☛ Why We Misunderstand the Chinese Internet

    Before we get to the downfall—it is coming!—Liu’s account emphasizes how, even early on, China’s Internet was influenced by the world, and especially by America. These worlds may be conceived as entirely separate by many today, but the truth is that cultural and commercial cross-pollination was the order of the day. Liu’s “dancers” found their love for feminism, hip-hop, and science fiction when China opened up to the world. Surplus music records sent to the country as waste products were rescued and sold in underground markets, introducing millions to Madonna, Kurt Cobain, and European metal and opera. Lü, the feminist activist, came to her politics after attending the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. Jack Ma was inspired to pivot to e-commerce after a business trip to Seattle, where he used a search engine for the very first time.

  • CPJ ☛ Taliban shut down and seize Rah-e-Farda TV station in Afghanistan

    Taliban officials expelled employees from the premises before taking control of the building, the journalist told CPJ, adding that the station was closed and its assets confiscated by order of Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • El País ☛ An Iranian woman adopted by a US military officer 50 years ago faces deportation: ‘The war makes it even more dangerous’

    Just when she thought the prospect of being deported to Iran couldn’t get any worse, the country she considers her own, the United States, attacked her ancestral homeland. “This is all crazy. It’s surreal. It’s definitely more dangerous for me now,” says Buttons, the nickname she was given as a child because of her large, dark eyes, which this Iranian woman prefers to use to avoid being identified.

  • TruthOut ☛ Noem Refuses to Apologize to Alex Pretti’s Parents During Heated Senate Hearing

    “They should be alive today,” Klobuchar said of the two 37-year-old US citizens. “In fact, in one month, in the city of Minneapolis, when you look at the three fatalities that were results of shooting, two of three were committed by federal agents.”

  • [Repeat] Michael Geist ☛ More Transparency Not Police Reporting: Navigating the Safety-Privacy Balance for AI ChatBots

    My Globe and Mail op-ed begins by noting that AI Minister Evan Solomon summoned executives from OpenAI to Ottawa last week to explain why the company declined to alert police that it had flagged the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar, the Tumbler Ridge shooter who killed eight people earlier this month. The company stopped short of warning authorities, concluding that the account activity did not meet its standard of an “imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others.” After the meeting, Mr. Solomon expressed disappointment with OpenAI, saying the company had not presented “substantial new safety protocols.” Justice Minister Sean Fraser said it expects OpenAI to make changes, or else the government would step in to regulate artificial intelligence companies.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Rolling Stone ☛ Live Nation, Ticketmaster Trial Begins With Opening Statements

  The Department of Justice filed its lawsuit, and insisted Live Nation and Ticketmaster be broken up, in May 2024. In the nearly two years it’s taken for the case to reach trial, the government has skirted Live Nation’s efforts to toss the suit. But the scope of the DOJ’s claims has narrowed, thanks in large part to a pre-trial ruling in February. In that summary judgment, Judge Arun Subramanian dismissed claims that Live Nation has a monopoly over the concert promotion industry, and that its conduct has led to higher ticket prices.

  But the judge did allow the DOJ’s two most significant claims to remain. First, that Live Nation illegally “ties” access to its myriad amphitheaters to its promotion services, meaning any artist that wants to play one of those venues has to use the company as a promoter. Second, the DOJ alleges that Live Nation illegally forces venues to sign long-term contracts with Ticketmaster, as opposed to other ticketing services, in part by threatening to keep popular tours from hitting venues that don’t use Ticketmaster.

• Copyrights

  • Creative Commons ☛ AI's Infrastructure Era: Reflections from the AI Impact Summit in Delhi

    The gaps are especially pronounced across Global South languages and cultural contexts. Researchers are working to supplement large models with local norms and knowledge to address bias and misrepresentation. This is particularly urgent in sectors such as health, agriculture, climate, and development, where high-quality open datasets could unlock substantial public benefit.

    There is a real tension here. High-quality open data is required to power public interest AI. At the same time, without guardrails, open data can be exposed to extraction and misuse. Communities are often presented with a false choice: open their data and risk exploitation, or close their data and risk exclusion from shaping AI systems that affect them. Addressing this tension is essential if governance frameworks are to support both individual agency and shared stewardship. In essence, we need to: [...]

  • Torrent Freak ☛ YggTorrent Shuts Down After Hack, Leak and Stolen Crypto

    YggTorrent, the largest francophone torrent community, has shut down permanently following a devastating hack. The cyberattack compromised YggTorrent's infrastructure, wiped key information, and drained the site's crypto wallets. The hacker publicly published the site's data online in a massive 11+ GB archive, noting that this could be of interest to law enforcement.

  • Reuters ☛ US Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material

    Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office ​decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection ​because it did not have a human creator.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Mondrian is public domain. His estate disagrees.

    The math is simple: anything published before 1978 gets 95 years of copyright. The painting came out in 1930. Add 95, and you land on January 1, 2026. Done. But when an art magazine contacted the Trust for confirmation, the Trust warned that the work "remains protected" and that reproducing it "constitutes copyright infringement." Their legal theory invokes something called "dual copyrights" — a concept that does not exist anywhere in U.S. copyright law.